GAZETTE COLUMN: CLARKE AND HIGGINS – WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN ELECTION MAKES by John P. Flannery

Janet Clarke, the newly minted Supervisor from Blue Ridge, has apparently dropped her campaign pose of being democratically responsive.  Fresh into her new job, she’s telling us what she’s going to do without asking us folk in Lovettsville what we think about it at a hearing or public meeting. 

She’s dictating to us folk who live in and near Lovettsville, in the Catoctin District, a magisterial district that she does not represent, where she insists that the County build a new middle school and a new high school. 

In fact and in truth, we don’t have the students in Lovettsville to justify these schools, we are at the County’s edge, close to the Potomac and thus not “centrally located,” and for these and other reasons, many parents are of the firm view that we don’t need and don’t want these schools here.

It is fascinating how people come to Western Loudoun from elsewhere and want to change what we have.  They come from Fairfax, as Ms. Clarke did, saying that they love our open country and then, shortly thereafter, they set themselves to marginalizing working farms, paving dirt roads, straightening the smooth turns of a country road so they can better speed on it, cutting down trees, driving out wild life, and squandering the resources including our challenged waterways that made this rolling land in Loudoun a natural treasure.

Those of us who have been here for a while who have helped Johnny (and Mary Jo) learn to read, sent our children on a school bus or drove them ourselves and neither our children nor any of us parents were the worse for wear.  When I was a kid in New York, I traveled by bus and subway across a fair distance in the Bronx to get to high school.  My daughter’s travel was shorter and faster than my own – not that I ever complained about my own daily odyssey. 

So this declaration of intent by Ms. Clarke is not really about helping Johnny to read.  It’s about building schools that we don’t need in places that don’t make sense in order to spur residential development that would not otherwise occur without the infrastructure that a school requires. 

It’s the field of schemes – build it and we shall pay -- our taxpayer dollars spent widening roads, providing water, sewer and electrical infrastructure so that the developer won’t have to spend those funds himself – Loudoun’s down home version of corporate welfare.

Supervisor Clark insists it would be “shameful” if these schools weren’t built in Lovettsville.  What is truly “shameful” is Ms. Clarke telling us what to do, deciding our fate, calling us all names, without a single public hearing on the matter.

Incidentally, Lovettsville’s actual representative for the Catoctin District, Geary Higgins, told us during the recent campaign how he restored homes, loved the environment, and proposed to listen carefully to what the voters wanted.  Now that he’s elected, however, he has made his position clear on these schools – he’ll do what Ms. Clarke, the Board’s new Vice Chair, wants, also without first hearing what the citizens want.  So we are on notice that we have an echo, not a voice in Mr. Higgins’s notion of “stewardship” for our district – and that he is as undemocratic as Ms. Clarke.

An election is a transforming experience because only then do we find out what we got.  Sorry to say, early indications are that what we got is highly indifferent to democratic – small d – principles by which elected officials invite the public to say what they want, and to object to what they don’t want, rather than being told by the political class what they’re going to get.

SP PROFILE: JANET CLARKE – REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR BLUE RIDGE SUPERVISOR by John P. Flannery

Janet & Tom Clarke – a more private moment

            Janet Clarke cares to be “connected” and “educated” because she had challenges as a child and young adult that compromised her opportunity to enjoy either; but she’s made up since for what she missed; and her experience may have something to do with how “connected” and “educated” her own children are.

Janet is the Republican nominee for Supervisor for the Blue Ridge District; Janet is challenging the incumbent, Jim Burton, an Independent who has served on the Board of Supervisors since 1995.

“I had to grow up too soon,” Janet said.  “My parents divorced when I was 9 and I was raised on welfare, and worked at an early age, helping to support my mother, and we were always moving from place to place, and so I attended 11 different schools.” 

Janet worked as a waitress, a locksmith apprentice, drove a school bus, did data entry, and took three interviews to land an IT job on the graveyard shift at Tysons, from 11 pm to 7 AM, with a packet switch data company.  In the beginning, Janet earned $15,000 a year from that IT company, and four years later, was making 6 figures in their Sales division, prompting MCI to recruit her to sell their government systems.

Along the way, Janet left High School at 16 to work, but went back at night to get her GED.   When she enjoyed some success in IT, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Community Interrelations from George Mason University and got her Master’s in Education and Human Development from George Washington University; she said, she hopes yet to earn a doctorate but hasn’t decided the discipline, but she will decide in the next five years.

Her three children range in age from 17 to 29; and one daughter loves literature, web design and teaching; and she has a son who favors physics and chemistry, robotics and astronomy.

Janet has not intellectualized why she set herself apart from her family to survive when she was young but she recoiled from simply suffering or surrendering. 

Janet said she refused pessimism as an approach to life, and perhaps that made her open to those willing to help her at the various schools she attended and the jobs she had. 

When Janet found herself traveling about 75% of the time as a professional, she gave up her career and moved her family to Loudoun, to a “changed lifestyle.”

“I was always seeking that community connection,” Janet said, “I also sought to connect people the way I was always seeking to be connected myself.”

“I had started a program teaching Hispanics English as a second language,” Janet said, “when I was Chair of the Church and Society program in Herndon.”

“People come to me with a need,” said Janet, “and I’m going to do what I can to do to help.  My spiritual foundation gave me strength.”

“We moved to Purcellville on a quarter Acre lot, with a colonial home,” Janet said, “because I believe in a walkable community.  It’s wonderful for people to have land but this was best for our family.  My husband, Tom, is a wonderful Southern Gentleman.  This works for him.  Our children also liked living in town.”

“As soon as we moved here, I got involved in the local community,” said Janet, “and joined the Loudoun Youth Initiative, and in March 2005, I chose to pull together volunteers for a teen center and skating rink.”

While Janet has a lot of respect for Mike Farris, founder of Patrick Henry College, founded for Christian home-schooled students, she reserved her enthusiasm for his students who helped getting her teen center started. 

“These kids are a wonderful culture to bring into this community,” she said, “and my paid campaign manager, Susanna Foote, is a May graduate of Patrick Henry with a degree in government.”

“When Council member Bob Lazaro was elected as Mayor, opening up a two year term on the Council,” said Janet, “I applied and was appointed to the unexpired term.  The ‘Woodgrove School issue’ was going on, and all three of my children were affected by the overcrowding issues in school.”

The irony of course was that, despite the overcrowding, the Purcellville Town Council opted to sue Loudoun County to block the construction of Woodgrove High School on the Fields Farm property that the County bought in 2000 for that purpose, and Janet supported the Town’s law suit that went on for three years, ending with the school located right where the County wanted it.  The good news, in the end, was that her son got to attend Woodgrove High School.

As for who advises her on her campaign, Janet said, “I’m an independent soul.  I feel that I know what direction I should be going in.  Everyone is ready to give their advice or opinion.  When it comes right down to it, I know what’s best.”

Looking down the road at the challenge to any Supervisor, Janet said, “There’s all this zoning that has already been done and building going on throughout the community.  These people are coming.  They are going to be here.”

What this means, in terms of budget, Janet said, is that “[w]e are already pushed up against the wall on the budget because we have to provide services to the people coming into the community including schools and roads.  That’s the big over-arching thing, the budget, how to balance our money because in these economic times there are so many who are just getting by.”

As for how, Janet said, “We can’t increase the taxes.  Even my brother, a civil engineer, just lost his job.  That’s definitely going to be a challenge.”

“We depend too heavily on the housing market, on the residential budget,” said Janet, “That’s a bad thing.”

“The answer,” Janet said, “We need policies in place that are more business friendly, create more local employment and more business revenue to increase the commercial tax base and reduce the burden on the residential taxpayers.  The process in the county is very business unfriendly.  It’s inconsistent and cumbersome and costly and risky.”

But what can we do in the short term to change the tax base so there are more businesses to help shoulder the cost? 

Janet said, “We need to act quickly.”

How can we improve communications between the Board of Supervisors and the School Board? 

Janet said, “Part of the problem is there haven’t really been board members with an understanding of the school system to respect the School Board’s opinion and I don’t think the effort has been made for everyone to discuss this in a respectful and reasonable fashion.”  

How do we get them all to be “respectful?”

“I’m a big proponent of bringing someone in who’s neutral,” Janet said, “someone from the northern Virginia mediation service to facilitate and they can get both parties to look at things different.”  Janet thought “that a third party facilitator would be the least threatening of any particular approach.”

Will the Board do this?

“If they are truly interested in working things through,” Janet said, “and being able to come to agreement, then they will be willing to try anything.  If people care enough they will make that effort, it can’t be done by me, it must be done collectively.”